Trajectories
by avocadoenchilada
Summary: It had been nice while it lasted, but she always thought they were just on different paths, destined to fall apart.  Well, fate has made their trajectories intersect again, putting both of them in danger.  AU, A/A
1. Chapter 1

"Where is he?"

The shouting, demanding voice is what she wakes to. All of her senses are blurred, and she just wants to fall back asleep; the struggle to alertness is familiar from a few undergraduate forays into heavy drinking. She ignores the shrieking harpy for a minute and tries to get a grasp on her bearings. Had she been drugged? Where was she? Were… were her hands and feet bound?

They were. Fear replaces the drowsiness in an instant.

"Where is he?" the voice demanded, grabbing her collar roughly and dragging her into a sitting position.

She is completely terrified and utterly nonplussed. The man's face in front of her fades in and out of focus. "Who?" she asks, managing to keep her voice from trembling, but it's a close thing. Even in her stupor, she knows that he's a threat, he's angry, and he wants something from her, but beyond that, she knows nothing.

"Him!" And a picture is shoved into her face. Despite her swimming vision, she recognizes him instantly. Her heart skips several beats. What do they want with him? What do they want with _her_? This is absolutely ludicrous; she hasn't seen him in years! Her head clears, but she still can't make any sense out of the situation. She's not even sure how she got here. Then, it comes to her: she must be dreaming. Having reached that reassuring conclusion, she waits to wake up in the comfort of her own bed, but several long moments pass, and she's still here. However, knowing that she's dreaming, that this surely _can't_ be real, calms her, emboldens her.

"I have no idea who that is," she says coolly.

"Then why did we find _this_," the burly man says, shoving another piece of paper in her face, "on his desk! You know him! You know where he is!"

The letter is dated a few days ago. She recognizes the handwriting, and she sees the signature.

All she can do is breathe, "Oh my god…"

The first thing anyone notices about the high school is that it's on the top of a hill. Every morning, the students trudge up it from the parking lots at its base, like worshippers flocking to the Parthenon, except that no worshipper ever looked so desolate for having to visit the Parthenon. It's the first day of the semester, the beginning of a new year, and the enthusiasm level is slightly higher than normal. Still, while some are mustering up some admirable energy to greet old friends for the first time in months, few are genuinely excited to start what will inevitably be a long, hard slog.

A pair of sisters slams a car door shut and follows the herd up the hill. One would not know they were sisters without close inspection. They walked far apart, the petite, brunette, bescarved one taking the lead, the taller, pretty blonde being content to fall behind. No words were uttered between them. They were just two students on very different trajectories in life. They weren't friends. They weren't even amiable acquaintances. They just happened to live in the same house.

"Hey. Hey!" a voice calls out, but both ignore it. They don't recognize it, and there are plenty of similar greetings ringing out in the parking lot. Then, the older sister sees a somebody, a very close somebody, out of the corner of her eye. She looks up and catches sight of a perfect stranger. "Hey! Arthur," the stranger introduces himself, falling comfortably into step alongside her and stretching his hand in front of her.

"Ariadne," she answers after a moment, taking his hand and shaking it.

"New kid. Junior. You?" he says, perfectly friendly, perfectly at ease.

"Junior as well. Established kid," she says, mimicking his choppy, concise sentences and smiling a little bit. She doesn't know who he is, but it's hard not to like him. Plus, she should be kind to him. It can't be easy moving to a new school with only two years until graduation. "Where are you from?" she asks, a simple question, an ice breaker.

"Connecticut," he says smoothly without missing a beat. He doesn't expand on that answer until she prompts him, and they make small talk about schools and hometowns until they reach the school's front doors. He seems like a nice guy, and she invites him to the cozy corner where she and her friends await the summons of the first bell. He declines, saying he needs to get his schedule, locker, and all that fun stuff. She offers to help, and he declines again, saying something about preferring to find his own way. She is faintly disappointed as he walks away, but she hopes she sees more of him.

When she reaches her friends, they are in a spirited discussion of the new paramour of one of their own. She joins in the collective teasing, but the friend shuts them all up with a smirk and a dig at their own lackluster love lives. She protests that there's no one worth dating at their school, and a few other of her friends agree fervently. Despite her claims, she can't help but think of the stranger from a few minutes' earlier.

She sees him next in third period calculus. She's pleasantly surprised; it's one of the most advanced courses the school has to offer, and she always likes a smart guy. The teacher has nothing to teach on day one; the review assignment is put on the board without a word from her, and they start to work. They had her last year and they know better than to be intimidated; she'll warm up to them in time, scary and cold as she seems now. He asks to borrow her pencil sharpener, and she willingly hands it over. He fumbles at it, and their hands brush in the process. He maintains the contact for a split second too long before breaking it off, or perhaps that was her that did so. All she knows is that his hands are warm and hers are tingling and he probably didn't mean anything by it but maybe he _did, _and her mind is rushing a million miles a minute and couldn't possibly focus on the math that normally comes so easily to her.

She's so flustered that she doesn't even notice his pencils are all mechanical.

Author's Note: This is my first fanfiction! :D How am I doin' so far?


	2. Chapter 2

_"Then why did we find __this__," the burly man says, shoving another piece of paper in her face, "on his desk! You know him! You know where he is!"_

_The letter is dated a few days ago. She recognizes the handwriting, and she sees the signature._

_All she can do is breathe, "Oh my god…"_

"Not so clueless as we pretended, are we, missy?" the burly man leers. His dark brown eyes are nearly enveloped by his heavyset face, and her nose wrinkles in distaste as he leans in closer, his putrid breath smelling of cigarette smoke. The eyes are full of something like triumph. "I'll ask you again. _Where is he?"_

"I don't know!" she exclaims, frustrated and finally honest. "I don't know!" _Wake up!_ she tells herself, but she doesn't, and she can't help but think: this is oddly real for a dream.

The burly man pulls back, frowning. He sticks a leathery hand into his back pocket. "You'll give us what we want eventually," he growls, before revealing the handgun. She can't help herself; she gives a squeak of terror before he points the barrel at her forehead and pulls the trigger.

* * *

That night, she is doodling when her cell phone rings. It startles her; she just got it a few months ago for her sixteenth birthday and few people know her number yet. Mostly, it just sits silently on her desk, in all its novelty and chunkiness. The number's unfamiliar, but she answers it anyways.

"Hello?"

"Ariadne? It's Arthur."

"How did you get my number?" She can't help but be surprised, and she doesn't notice that her curiosity completely eclipsed her manners. She's puzzled: she certainly didn't give him her number, and she hopes her friends have the good sense not to hand it out like candy to random guys they've known for mere hours.

"I'm good at finding stuff out about people," he says simply. "You had Dupont last year for French Three, right?"

"Yes," she says, taken aback again. "How did you…?"

"I told you. I'm good. I have her this year. Is it true she gives out a pop test on the second day?" He's glad she can't see him smirk. He likes being able to befuddle her.

"If you really were that good, you'd know that was true. You'll fail it. Everyone does. Have fun." She hangs up, and she's glad he can't see her rolling her eyes. What an arrogant idiot, she thinks.

But she smiles.

* * *

She awakes in a panic and bolts upright, gasping for air. In the first second, she's terrified, as anyone would be after being shot in the head. In the second, relief overwhelms her. It was just a dream.

In the third second, she realizes that her hands and feet are still bound.

She barely keeps down a scream of terror. She's in a plain, dark, concrete room, not unlike the one from the dream. She sees the burly man talking in low tones to another, an overweight, well-dressed man. Then, both look up at her.

The burly man trudges back over, mindlessly twisting the same pistol from the dream through his hands. He sits down next to her, and she tries to shift away. He grabs her wrists, she makes a face (he smells as badly as he did in the dream), and he roughly yanks a needle from her skin, a detail she had somehow missed.

She only stares at him, wide-eyed, as he heaves himself to his feet and begins to pace around her. "What did the letter say?" he demands suddenly.

She had not been expecting that question. These people kidnapped her, drugged her, tied her up, and instead of asking how rich her parents were or, she didn't know, whatever kidnappers asked their victims, they ask about an imaginary letter? One that was supposed to be safely hidden in her head? "The letter," she repeats with disbelief. "I _dreamt_ the letter. How did you see…?"

"I was _there_," the burly man says slowly, as if she's an invalid, and he sneers.

"It was a dream! I was asleep!" she protests. Well, yes, he was there, but had she talked in her sleep or something? He hadn't actually been _there_, after all. It was a dream. The very idea was ludicrous.

Now it's his turn to look disbelieving. He pauses. Then, he laughs at her. "And we thought he would have trained her against it! He didn't tell her anything!" Her face colors angrily, irrationally because she should be scared out of her wits and is instead concerned about looking stupid, and she wants to demand from them what the _hell_ is going on, but the burly man doesn't give her an opportunity to speak. "Put us under again, Ramsey!" he says, sitting down next to her and slipping a needle dexterously into his own wrist, before grabbing hers none-too-gently and doing the same for her. "And this time," he growls at her, the sick humor gone from his voice, "read the damn letter."

* * *

Author's Note: Thank you for the lovely reviews! And in go those pesky lines, I thought I'd put them in properly last time, but apparently I still have much to learn about fun stuff like formatting! Enjoy (hopefully)!


	3. Chapter 3

From that point on, they are a something. It's the classic high school situation: she likes him, he likes her, he and she know of the reciprocal liking, and yet, nothing happens between them. It would be kind of humorous if she weren't up to her ears in puppy love.

It's a little ridiculous, how often she thinks of him. How her knees threaten to give out whenever their eyes meet. How her whole being lights up when the cell phone does, a call from a now very-familiar number.

Then she notices how he goes out of his way to find excuses to touch her hand, her hair, and she doesn't feel quite so ridiculous.

However, after weeks of this, she's getting impatient. She's sick of being in a strange, undefined something. She wants the her and him to become a them. After his forwardness, his confidence at the beginning of their friendship, she was surprised that he had become cautious at the critical moment. Typical spineless teenaged boy… Well, screw him. She'd take his caution and throw it in the wind.

* * *

She is back in the room again, fully awake and without the needle at her wrist. She's alone; the two men are nowhere to be found, which calms her, allows her to think. The fourth-year architecture student in her is immediately drawn to the design of the room. Such thoughts are familiar and comforting, well understood and well loved by her, and she clutches at them like a figurative security blanket. The room is the same one as the first dream, normal upon first glance, but the more she examines it, the stranger it is. The room is a flawless, featureless box, like something computer-generated. The walls, ceiling, and floor are perfect, unmarred plains. No seams, no screws or nails, no little paint bubbles. No switches for the overhead lights, no electrical outlets. Worst of all, no windows, and the singular door is locked. The little details give away how unrealistic the scene is; she has to be dreaming again. She's fairly sure the needle that had been unceremoniously shoved into her wrist had something to do with that. And the burly man had put one in his own wrist, so was he dreaming, too? And what was that he'd said, that he'd been there in her last dream? So, was he here in this one? How was that even possible?

Her head hurts.

She sits down in one of the room's corners, and, lazily, almost unaware of what she's doing, begins turning the unnatural black smoothness of the floor into a slick, shiny tiled one of the same color. It's not that much different but it's better, far better. Floor done, she turns her attention to the walls. Again, she does very little to it, merely giving it the imperfect texture of actual drywall. She adds wainscoting. The ceiling gets a few more lights to brighten the room, and it's then that she notices a piece of paper lying face down on the other side of the room. She scrambles to her feet and picks it up quickly. It's the same letter as the last time, the note from Arthur. She doesn't know why it holds so much interest for the two men, but she knows why it holds so much interest for herself. He had been something to her that she hadn't been able to replace in the four years since she'd last seen him, the four years in which he'd seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.

She begins to read.

* * *

That afternoon, when he opens his locker, a piece of paper slips out and falls to his feet. He picks it up and begins to examine it, in his careful, thorough way. It's a maze, impossibly complicated and lovingly hand-drawn. Letters, numbers, and symbols are scattered randomly in its pathway. In the middle is one word—her name, Ariadne. He smiles before tenderly folding the maze up and stowing it carefully in his backpack. She will have ensured it's not something he can solve in the five minutes between classes. He eagerly awaits the challenge. He loves her for providing the challenge.

Or maybe he just plain loves her.

* * *

She leans back against the wall, clutching the letter to her chest, eyes closed, a peaceful and genuine smile on her face. Her moment of happiness is short-lived, though, because at that moment, she hears the soft but unmistakable click of the lock popping open, and the door quickly follows suit. It's the burly man again. She should be afraid, but she's more annoyed than anything. What's the worst that can happen? He shoots her again?

"Get out of my dream," she says shortly, getting to her feet.

He ignores her. "What did it say?" He points to the letter.

"It's personal, actually," she says, trying for a bit of sarcasm, but she never was good at that.

In two long steps, he closes the distance between them, snatches what he sees as—what _is_—just a blank piece of paper, except to her, crumples it up, and tosses it aside. He unholsters the gun and begins twirling it around with practiced ease in his hands. "I'm not going to ask again. What did it say? Where did he flee?" he demands, raising his voice.

"Read it yourself!" she says shrilly, completely unafraid of the pistol. In a movement quicker than the blink of an eye, he points the gun at her and pulls the trigger, blowing out her kneecap. She lets out a terrible howl of agony before crumpling to the floor. The burly man steps over her, sneering. "If I kill you, you'll wake up. But I can hurt you as much as I want and you'll be stuck here, so long as I keep you alive. It's a lot easier to get your secrets from you when you're dreaming. This is what your boyfriend did to my client—stole his secrets in his sleep. I'm sure you'll be learning a lot about the process in the next few hours, reality time. But that could be days, weeks, down here. Should be fun, no?" And with a sadistic laugh, he pulls the trigger on himself, taking himself out of her dream while leaving her to suffer until the timer runs out.

* * *

That night, he sets the maze down, having finally solved the darned thing. The message is simple. "GIORDANOS * FRIDAY * 730."

He'll be there.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note: **Hey, guys! Sorry about the long delay- my computer got a nasty virus, and it took a while to kill it off. But, anyway, here's chapter four! =D

She arrives at Giordano's at seven-fifteen, confirms her reservation, and settles in at the Italian restaurant's little bar. She has no idea whether he'll come or not—she never asked him, and he never made any indication that he had even solved the maze and its hidden message. That didn't necessarily mean anything. He was good at hiding his thoughts and feelings when he so desired. She had learned that the hard way, after losing a month's worth of babysitting money to him in an impromptu poker game (she had been the unchallenged champion until he had come along).

And yet, the other half of her was close to an anxiety attack. Questions rushed through her head, far faster than her optimistic side could answer them. What if he _didn't_ come? What then? Was it stupid of her to have asked him out so soon? Several weeks weren't very long, after all… he probably did want to get to know her a little better before committing to anything! Or worse, what if she had completely misread everything and he did only like her as a friend?

At seven-twenty, she orders a ginger ale from the barkeeper to soothe her queasy stomach.

* * *

She wakes up with a violent jolt several agonizing seconds later after finally succumbing to death by blood loss. She has to take several steadying breaths before finding her voice.

"What the _hell_?"

"I warned you!" the burly man laughs, once again yanking the needle out of her wrist and putting it back in the silver suitcase. "Lemme know if you need me to put her under again," he says, winking, to the overweight, older man, before leaving the room.

She surveys the older man, calculating her chances in a fistfight against him. He must outweigh her by at least two to one, but she's young and fit, and he's, well,

not. She's trying to think of the best way to launch her attack when he speaks.

"I find it quite hard to believe you won't help us."

"Excuse me?" she says, astonished. "You've killed me twice now in dreams. Which are private things. That you shouldn't be in."

"We were only trying to help you help us. It's not our fault you were being, ah, uncooperative."

She says nothing, too stunned for words that he can even _think_ she'd be willing to help him after drugging, kidnapping, and imprisoning her, and then performed the aforementioned offenses.

"We thought you would be rather willing to help apprehend a thief such as him," the older man continues. At that, she finally finds her voice.

"Arthur, a _thief_? Are we talking about the same person?" she exclaims. There is no way her prim, polished, polite ex-boyfriend is a criminal, much less a petty thief. "The guy who spent a week tracking down the woman at the grocery store so he could return the twenty-dollar bill she dropped? No way!" she scoffs. It's true that he himself admitted he had mostly done it for the challenge, but still!

The old man gives a low laugh. "Oh, he's worse than the person who steals money." He gets up and sits down closer to her, now that she's so enraptured by what he's saying that she's completely forgotten about fighting her way out of the room. "He steals people's secrets. People like our client."

* * *

She fidgets and checks her watch again. Seven twenty-eight. She casts a hopeful glance to the entrance, but there's no familiar head with the well-groomed crop of black hair. She looks down at her drink again and resists the temptation to look at the time again, five seconds after the last time she checked. There's still time, he could still be coming…

"Quick, gimme a kiss," a low voice whispers in her ear, and before she can process the situation, a hand is gently turning her cheek, and warm lips are pressed softly to hers. Then, much too soon, the lips are gone, replaced by a frustratingly calm, unfazed face (though his twinkling eyes ruined the guise).

"What…?" she begins, but before she can finish the question, he's already answering.

"That ignoramus over there has had his eyes glued to your butt since I walked in," he says smoothly, tilting his head over to the offending party. Surely enough, a physically imposing jock in a letterman's jacket glares at him before returning his gaze to the food. "Oh, there we go. Now, I believe we have a reservation at seven-thirty to catch?" He slides off of the bar stool and extends a hand to her.

"And hello to you, too," she says wryly, but she grins and happily takes his hand.

* * *

"_What_?" is her first reaction. "No!" is her second. "How?" is her third.

"It's a lot easier to get information when the keeper of it is asleep. The untrained subconscious is not very good about guarding such things. A trained thief—an extractor, it's called—can share a dream with the victim and locate and steal his or her secrets," the older man says evenly, with the tone of one of the lectors at her university.

"And Arthur is one of these… extractors?" she breathes, horrified. She can't believe it.

"Indeed. He got into our client's mind and stole quite a bit. He then encountered our client in the dream, and the client was accidentally killed in the ensuing fight. As you know," the older man said, nodding in a way that was supposed to be kindly to her, "when you die in a dream, you wake up. The client woke up first, saw himself hooked up to the silver suitcase, saw your Arthur still asleep hooked to the same machine, and recognized him. Unfortunately, the thief had a partner to man the machine, and said partner hit him in the head with something and knocked him out. They were gone by the time he regained consciousness."

She gaped, open-mouthed, for several seconds following this. "How do I know you're not just making all this up?" She finally demands, challenging him, unwilling to accept news like this so easily. She doesn't want to believe that it's true about her Arthur. How did he turn from her perfect, wonderful young man to this evil villain who preys on people when they're most vulnerable? It can't be possible. It can't.

"Well, all of this would be rather difficult to falsify," the older man says, a bit smugly, gesturing to the silver suitcase. She's not sure what to say—he has a point about that. "And, here, a picture from the train station's security camera, before they all boarded the train where our client was attacked," he says, procuring a photo from the inside of his suit jacket. She takes it hastily. It's him, a few years older than the last time she saw him, but unmistakably him. He's bent low with another man whose face is away from the camera and pointing to a third man. A silver suitcase, nearly identical to the one in front of her, is clutched in his hand. Suddenly, the picture blurs. She realizes that she's crying. She feels a pang of hatred for the man in the picture in front of her. A liar. A thief. A no-good, two-faced criminal.

"Our client never saw what secrets he took. We need to know what he stole and who he's working for, and we can't do that until we've found him. Are you ready to help us, Ariadne?" the older man says, his eyes searching for hers. She swallows and nods, blinking back tears. She wants revenge on him. He's betrayed her trust. She wants him to pay for what he's done to this poor, unsuspecting man, and the dozens that probably came before him. She wants him to pay for all he's done to _her._ She thought she had meant something to him.

Apparently she had been wrong.

* * *

"That was wonderful," he says as they leave the restaurant, her small hand firmly clasped in his own.

She stops suddenly, feigning confusion. "What do you mean, _was_? We're not done yet!" And with that, she grins and pulls him toward a little corner ice cream shop.

Five minutes later, they're sitting down at a small table outside, in the still-warm early autumn air with their dessert.

"So, how long did it take you to do the maze?" she asks.

"Thirty seconds," he says without missing a beat, so seriously that he fools her for a few moments. Then, he laughs, and she picks up her spoon as if threatening to beat him with it.

"Honestly!"

"I actually paid my little brother to do it," he tries again, but he cracks up instantly, ruining the ruse. She glares at him before dipping a finger into the whipped cream of her sundae and very deliberately streaking it on his nose. He merely raises his eyebrows, as if to say, "really?" but he can't resist revenge. He picks out a chocolate chip from his own, licks it, and sticks it firmly to her forehead. She pauses, considering what he just did. Then, with a sudden swiftness, she's flicked a spoonful of vanilla ice cream at him and gleefully runs off across the parking lot. In a second, he's after her, all dignity tossed out the window.

It doesn't take him long to catch her, a fact she'll forever blame on the heels she chose to wear that night. He pins her against someone's car, and she tries to wriggle away. The chocolate chip has long since fallen off, but the whipped cream is still there, and he makes good use of that by burying his nose in her hair and wiping the stuff off, eliciting a protesting squeal from her. Then, he kisses again, and she instantly forgets about the whipped cream in her hair.

"Fourteen minutes," he says when he pulls away. He leans in to press his lips to hers once more, chastely and sweetly, but she throws her arms around his neck and deepens the kiss.

* * *

All of her unspoken suspicions of why they needed her help when they had the letter, all her hatred of these two men for abducting and inflicting psychosomatic torture on her, all her deeply-buried desire to protect the man she had loved, even if that man had been replaced by another; all of that was gone.

"The Caribbean," she finally says harshly. "He always wanted to buy a little island in the Lesser Antilles. He said, in the letter, that he'd finally found one and he'd be waiting for me, as soon as I had a break from school."

The man leans his bulk back and smiles. Distraught as she is, she misses how sadistic it looks. "Very good. Thank you." And without another word, he follows his partner out of the door, leaving her alone.


End file.
